


Spirit in the Dark

by SegaBarrett



Category: 13 Reasons Why (TV)
Genre: F/M, Resurrection Spells
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 07:28:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29042379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Clay's not ready to let Hannah go.
Relationships: Hannah Baker/Clay Jensen
Comments: 4
Kudos: 1
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	Spirit in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Impala_Chick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Impala_Chick/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own 13 Reasons Why, and I make no money from this.

The Polaroids weren’t the only thing that Clay found in the clubhouse. After the place was cleared out and made into a storage room as an attempt to clean up the horrorshow the place had been, Clay went looking for any remaining evidence of what had happened here.

He didn’t find it. 

But he did find, tucked away in a cabinet, pushed in the back behind a few old notebooks, a leather-bound book. He pulled it back and flipped through it – the pages were streaked with water damage, but he could still read it all.

Page after page was full of promises. _Eternal life. Eternal youth. Make anyone fall in love with you._

And the page that Clay’s finger lingered on the longest – _bring someone back from the dead._

***

This wasn’t the kind of thing that he could tell Justin about. Sure, they had been getting closer, but Clay assumed that telling him about his plan to resurrect Hannah might make Justin think that he had gone a little weird.

 _Yeah,_ Clay thought to himself, think. _He would only think it._

So he hid the book under his bed, behind a few porn magazines, figuring that it would be something Justin wouldn’t want to snoop in because it would be a weird thing to know about your brother.

There it was, that word again – _weird._

This was maybe a little beyond weird, if Clay was being completely honest with himself.

But the last year had been beyond weird, too, and beyond heartbreaking, and always that little bit more than Clay could really hope to handle. So if this could get him back, get him back to the beginning and get him somewhere where he could be comfortable (somewhere he could see Hannah again, he just needed to see Hannah again) then he was willing to risk whatever it might take.

***

Clay had never been so happy to see Justin rush off to the movies with Jessica, giggling together like a pair of twittering birds.

It was nice to see Justin happy, and even nicer to know that he would have the house to himself as his parents were on a “date night”.

He spread out the ingredients listed on the page on the kitchen counter and made sure that the front door was firmly locked. 

And then he reached into his pocket for the last ingredient – a lock of Hannah’s hair. 

He didn’t want to let it go. It felt like this was letting her go, in the hopes that this would work.

Very little had worked out for Clay.

Clay sucked in a breath and closed his eyes for a moment; he stroked his fingers over the hair, his thumb running over it as he tried to picture the girl behind it.

The girl who had cut her hair because Liberty had been chipping away at her and taking away everything that she was. 

Now, she would get another chance – if Clay had anything to say about it.

Clay worked into the early evening, throwing all of the ingredients into a pan on the stove – he figured his parents wouldn’t mind if he cleaned it out later – and then cranking up the dial. The steam rose to his nose and, when he started to despair, he heard something…

_BLAR! BLAR! BLAR!_

“The freaking smoke detector,” Clay grumbled, pulling a chair over and climbing up on it with a broom. He took aim at the offending smoke detector and poised himself to strike.

“Get down from there. You’re going to kill yourself.”

Clay turned his head and nearly did fall from the chair, broom and all.

“Helmet, what the hell are you doing?” Hannah Baker asked. She was dressed, appropriately, all in black, and her skin was a few shades paler than it had been when – when he had last seen her. 

He scampered down from the chair and stared, open-mouthed, at her.

“It worked,” he whispered, not ready to believe it, and stepped forward tentatively.

“It did,” Hannah replied, “So what have I missed, Helmet? Tell me everything.”

***

Hiding a hallucination of Hannah in his room proved to be much easier than hiding the real deal. For one, while the reanimated Hannah didn’t sleep exactly, she needed somewhere to be – Clay set up a bed for her on the couch where he had hidden Justin, but he would have to hope Justin wasn’t feeling nostalgic and or wondering where he had last placed one of his socks, or he would get a hell of a start.

Secondly, Hannah’s six-month slumber had, apparently, compelled her to eat most of the food in the Jensen family refrigerator. By the time he made it back from the grocery store, she had finished off all the chicken strips and an entire box of fries.

He stood in the kitchen and merely stared, not sure exactly what words to use when the ghost of the girl you love is moving on to a pack of lunch meat that, Clay reflects, she really shouldn’t because his father had told him to throw it out and Clay had forgotten.

“Eh,” Clay said, stepping forward, and when he found his hand against Hannah’s shoulder, he let out a little squeak.

Maybe he hadn’t quite realized what he had been asking for, he mused.

She was real – truly real, really real, his mind reeling too. 

“So, Clay,” Hannah said, “How would you like to spend our first night together, then?”

Clay gulped, and Hannah cracked a smile.

“You’re a real pervert, aren’t you?” she asked, but there was teasing in her voice. “You have to have brought me back for some reason, didn’t you? So why don’t you tell me what it is?”

“I had a lot of things to ask you,” Clay said, “Things about the trial.”

“If you want to know about a trial, then you could check a law library. I assumed that you asked me back because you want to know something about me.”

Clay swallowed and asked, “Zach told everybody that you had sex with him. Is that true?”

Hannah blinked.

“You brought me all the way back here to ask if I had sex with Zach?”

He watched as she leaned against the door and the frivolity of the question hit him all at once.

“No,” he said at last, “That doesn’t matter. I don’t care if you had sex with Zach or, well, with anybody at all. I just needed you to come back. The world is… it’s cold without you in it.”

“It was cold with me in it, Helmet. It’s always been cold. That’s a law of nature, I think. When you pry through to the center, it’s not lava, it’s ice.”

Clay looked back at her and reached out, grabbing her hand in his.

“Then what can we do?” he asked. “I did all this to bring you back, and now I’m worried that you’re just going to walk back out the door on me, before I have a chance to say everything that I need to say.”

“Then say it,” Hannah whispered. 

Clay’s throat felt raw as he tried to find the words. 

“I love you,” he began, because that had to be the most important piece, didn’t it?

Hannah sighed and looked away.

“Why did you bring me back?” she asked. “What is it that you want? What do you… hope is going to happen here? You know that I can’t walk out that door.”

“You could go somewhere else, start over,” Clay said.

“Yeah, see how well that worked out for Justin, right?”

Clay dragged his hands down his face.

“I just wish that there was something that I could do for you, now… Why didn’t I do it then?”

“Sometimes there’s nothing you can do, Helmet,” Hannah said. “I can stay here as long as you want… Or you can really let me go.”

“And then do what?”

“Do anything. You have a long life ahead of you, don’t you? Graduate. Travel the world. Fall in love.”

“I did that right here.” 

Hannah looked at him and reached out to gently grip him by the collar.

“Maybe I don’t have to go just yet. Maybe I could teach you a few things first.”

“That you learned from Zach?” Clay fired back, because maybe if they kept fighting, she would never leave.

Hannah pulled him all the way back into his room and plopped him on the bed.

“Just for that, I shouldn’t teach you anything at all. Point of order, Clay, whether I slept with no people or six hundred people, I am going to know more than you, and you know why?”

Clay’s eyes went wide.

“Why?”

“Because you don’t know anything at all. Now, stop talking and I’ll show you where you should put that mouth.”

And just like that, Clay wasn’t worried about Justin coming home soon anymore.

He would figure out something to tell him, right?

**The End**


End file.
